Willful Ignorance and Its Unavoidable Impact: The Unraveling of the American Empire….

 

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  – George Santayana, The Life of Reason:

The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. 1 (1905-1906) 

I’m tired: it was a really long week. And I’m also tired because it’s been a really long year … and, in truth, a really long three years. I’m supposed to be writing several business-focused pieces on important topics today, but I just can’t summon the energy … because I’m tired physically, emotionally and spiritually.…

And yet I am moved to write, as I continue to be dismayed by who we are revealing ourselves to be: the sneering, braying ignorance and arrogance on display so broadly throughout our polity is both troubling and, too many of us, surprising. But perhaps it shouldn’t be.

In keeping with the Best Practice that I discovered while leading my team at work (from Lu, et. al., “To Be More Creative, Schedule Your Breaks”), I’ve chosen to practice Disciplined Switching personally as well. The concept is pretty simple, if a bit antithetical to those of us who were converted to the concept of Flow a few decades ago: in order to stay fresh and to keep our minds from comfort zones that feel productive but have been proven by research to be decreasingly so, we’re well-advised to set consciously artificial but observed deadlines for our chosen activities and then to switch to another activity for a prescribed period of time. The research suggests that not only will we have greater mental acuity during our second activity but that when we return to the first (after a prescribed interval) the same will also be true.

So, instead of a single book, I’m actually reading three simultaneously and switching in a disciplined way between and among them:

The first is Isabel Wilkerson’s powerful and haunting new book Caste, which describes in harrowing detail the astonishing and distressing similarities of three systems of racially-/ethnically-based structural discrimination and disenfranchisement, those of race/structural racism here in America, of the Nazi Third Reich that patterned its murderous xenophobia on the American model and of the millennia-old, stratified system of impenetrable benefit and constriction in India. As it deconstructs the Eight Pillars of Caste, awful ‘eureka!’ moments begin to land with all their distressing and debilitating ferocity: we recognize these patterns in our social relations and gain a new appreciation for how they intertwine to oppress so many and advantage so few. It’s a must-read, but challengingly so: truly, it’s difficult but imperative for us to study how we’ve chosen repeatedly throughout our history as a species to harm ourselves, and often catastrophically.

The second is Robert P Jones’ White Too Long, a fascinating if similarly harrowing and challenging exploration of how American religion – especially that of the Protestant, evangelical variety – and White Supremacy have become and been dismayingly intertwined and powerfully punishing throughout our country’s history. It, too, is a hard read, but a required one for People of Faith: if we truly believe in a uniquely virtuous Divinity, then we have to face the damningly contrasting reality of what so many of us have done in His/Her/Its Name.…

The third, the latest entry into the rotation, is a purposely disruptive exploration by Prof. James W Loewen entitled Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Convincingly argued, the short answer is that we were all fed a sanitized version of our country’s history, the consequences of which can be seen in the societal upheaval that we’re experiencing now. This, too, I consider required reading, both because it explores the realities of the myths that we were taught and because it helps us develop a more incisive and nuanced assessment of the present state of our polity (as well as, perhaps, some correctives that’ll enable us to go forward differently and better…).

What do all three of these books have in common other than being challenging reads? They remind us, implore us and demand of us, achingly so, to face the truth/reality of who we are and what we’ve done, as well as to explore and elucidate the enormous and incalculable costs of our historic failure to do so, both over time and in the present moment.

Here are just a few examples:

Do you realize that in constructing the evil that became the Third Reich, the Nazis actually studied American racism and specifically the legal apartheid known somewhat euphemistically as Jim Crow in order to construct their singularly immoral and inhumane regime? If you read Caste, you’ll learn this and a good deal more about our recurring historical tendency to structuralize the dehumanization of and discrimination against groups of our fellow human beings. 

Do you realize the extent to which ‘Christianity’ in both its theological and institutional forms has been used to suppress African-Americans and privilege whites? For example, did you know that (white) religious were some of the major proponents of America’s racist and exclusionary residential policies, and, in fact, were often named plaintiffs in lawsuits to prevent integration of communities throughout this country? Or that, to this very day, the official state song of Mississippi – “Go, Mississippi” – is based on a jingle from 1960s segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett’s campaigns, which were endorsed, propelled and backed financially and otherwise by the leadership of the most influential Southern Baptist and United Methodist churches in the state, and that, in this century alone, four separate efforts to replace this racist, religious relic have failed? If you read White Too Long, you’ll learn that so many concepts and events that seem familiar are actually far more sinister in nature than we’ve been led to believe largely because they’ve been cloaked in racist religion.

Do you realize that a century ago we had a rabid white supremacist president who segregated the federal government, welcomed racist propaganda into the White House and endorsed it broadly, engaged in unauthorized, interventionist foreign mini-wars (including fighting on the wrong, “white” side of the Russian Revolution) and was wildly and widely despised in his time though he’s been sanitized and transformed into a hero in our popular imagination as well as our children’s textbooks? If you read Lies My Teacher Told Me, you’ll learn this and so much more about the lies you were told about Woodrow Wilson and the other myths that you were trained to believe about our history. Suffice it to say that, if you do, it’ll be much easier to understand the studied commitment to arrogance and ignorance exhibited by so many of our fellow citizens and why so many are so completely enthralled by the increasingly mythical concept of American Exceptionalism that becomes ever more divorced from reality each day.

Here’s another little tidbit: what were you taught about Helen Keller? Chances are that it was the hero story of her overcoming being blind and deaf, which led to her being transformed into a safe but inspirational icon of perseverance in the face of adversity [which itself aligns nicely with the American myth of individualism]. This has been accomplished by focusing on the formative years of her life and ignoring the last six decades of it. As Prof. Loewen notes: 

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. … Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. … Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. … Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. … Keller … never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change.

Funny, but that’s not the Helen Keller about whom I learned; what about you?

All of which brings to mind the enormous cost of our tendency toward historical amnesia and hagiography: to paraphrase the song, what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget or, often, to ‘misremember’ (i.e., to remember very differently than its reality). Which brings us to the 21^st century and the most immoral, inhumane and unqualified president we’ve had in quite some time, whose greatest legacy (other than hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths) will be the mainstreaming of unreality and bald-faced lies as the currency of our societal exchange.

What these three powerfully incisive books remind us is just how great the cost of such willful and willing blindness and ignorance can be and is. Simply put, our past failures to acknowledge the whole of our history and our consistent practice of whitewashing its uncomfortable parts has led us to a place where this latter practice is the rule rather than the exception and where we’re exhorted repeatedly to overlook what we can see plainly with our eyes and instead to believe something very different and routinely untrue.

Seriously, does any one of us truly believe that basing our lives, our collective/social relations and our engagement with the world in unreality and falsehood is a good idea?

If not, then how did we get to this place where we seem, collectively, to be on the verge of adopting such a practice permanently?

The answer, I believe, is in our failure to learn and deal honestly with our history, which is both destroying our present and imperiling our future.

So, what can we do to arrest this long-standing but pernicious practice (if not tradition)? Vote. But, even more than this, commit to the full and unyielding embrace of Truth in our lives both individually and collectively. Among other things, this will force us to challenge ourselves to assess whether our perspectives are based in reality or stem from the rosy lens of how we’d prefer that our lives and experiences have been and are. And it’ll force us to demand the same of those who would presume to lead us, as we owe it to ourselves and each other to enhance the likelihood of our collaboration and shared progress.

But make no mistake: if we choose to conceive of ourselves and believe that we are a peaceful people whose country just happens to have been at war for more than three-quarters of its existence; or that because our founding documents, laced though they were with the imprint of slavery, proclaim that we're all equal, there’s no structural racism/White Privilege or sexism or religiocentricity or heterosexism or xenophobia, etc., in our society; or that, even though two of the five times that the Electoral College has been invoked to decide the presidency have occurred this century, so many of us cling to the fiction that our individual votes don’t count; or that.…

Well, you get the picture: if we choose not to believe the truth, the likelihood is that we’ll further imperil our ability to craft a better future for ourselves and our successors.

And pardon me for being a touch cynical, but isn’t this what we Baby Boomers claimed that we’d do differently a half-century ago in our youth? You know, we assailed our parents for having sold out, but we, in our cock-sure righteousness, were going to change the world for the better, right?

Perhaps it’s time for us to admit our often abject failure at this aspiration and pass the baton to younger, less delusional generations. Although it’s by no means been universal, the young have had access to far more information than we had, so the majority of them have moved closer to the complex truth of who we are and how we’ve come to be.

But I do believe that we elders have a role to play: it’s incumbent upon us to acknowledge the reality of our failures and to share these insights – along with the learnings from our triumphs – with our successors. Apparently, they’re far more capable of accepting both the troubling and inspiring aspects of the legacy that we’re bequeathing them, so perhaps they’ll be able to help us evolve in constructive ways that might just allow us to reclaim the ideal of the American Dream and yet have it be reality-based for all for the first time.…

When you fight reality, you will lose every time. Once you accept the situation for what it truly is, not what you want it to be, you are then free to move forward.

– Jenni Young McGill